NASA Budget Infographic

This poster illustrates the changes in the NASA budget over the years (solid circles) since its creation in relation to the growing budget of the entire US federal government (large rings). This is supplemented by blurbs of various NASA spinoff technologies that can be traced back to NASA like baby food, cordless vacuums, ear thermometers and plane winglets. The bottom set of circles represents the percentage of NASAs budget relative to the federal budget, maxing out at 4.4% during the Apollo Era and dwindling down at 0.5% in recent times.

The idea behind this was to illustrate the data in a way that references space itself with the tiny white circles acting as planets on a vast dark background, and the large rings as visualized orbits.

Final poster design to be printed on a gloss paper

Process

Initial concept rough sketch

PlotDevice was used to generate the circular forms. The code just uses simple for loops to draw elements from a number of data sets i'd prepared. A large portion of time was spent on tweaking the values to make sure the composition and visuals were as I wanted.